A new day for food aid

Today, a new multilateral Food Assistance Convention (FAC) is available for signature. Thirty-four counties and the European Union will be eligible to sign the convention (countries must be food aid donors to sign). As with all international treaties, countries must follow their signature with ratification: a formal process that makes the treaty binding in the signatory country. The FAC will come into effect on January 1, 2013, assuming at least 5 states have ratified it. The last version, signed in 1999, had 8 signatories. The United States, which contributes close to 60 percent of global food aid, was a signatory of previous FACs and a negotiator of the new convention. (Read more about US food aid here). It is expected the US will sign and ratify the new treaty.

 

The convention comes after years of formal and informal negotiations among food aid donor governments. One of the important changes is a new name: food assistance, not food aid. This may not seem important, but the new name indicates the treaty has broadened its definition of food aid in important ways. The convention is no longer limited to food and seed donations but will also cover cash transfers and voucher programs, and agricultural inputs for early recovery: tools that have long been used in food aid programs and are now finally getting the recognition they deserve as an important part of humanitarian assistance. It is also positive that the controversial issue of monetized food aid (selling food aid in local markets to generate funds for development projects), a practice that most food aid donors have rejected, but that the U.S. continues to espouse, is no longer accepted unquestioningly, as it was in the 1999 convention. Monetization is now constrained to situations where there is a particular reason for the practice. Indeed, the new Food Assistance Convention successfully embodies a number of best practices for food aid that is very much welcomed.

 

The convention is in other ways a disappointment. Food aid recipients are not invited to be parties to the convention, something that many NGOs had hoped to change in this iteration of the deal. This comes in spite of the food aid donor governments’ commitment to the principles of national-ownership of development programming – a commitment made in Rome at the World Food Summit of 2009, and in the wider discussions on overseas development assistance, in Paris in 2005, in Accra in 2008 and in Busan, South Korea in 2011.

 

Perhaps most critically, the convention no longer asks signatories to commit to minimum food aid donations. And financial as well as physical commitments are allowed (say $2 million worth of food aid, rather than 300,000 bushels of wheat). Such value-based commitments create exactly the situation donors should avoid: the strong risk of having less food aid available when prices are high and need is greatest. Food aid has been countercyclical in this way since its inception 60 years ago. For a convention signed in 2012 to take a step backwards toward less predictability is more than a pity. It does a real disservice to those that rely on food aid.

 

Not all is lost, however. Some of the FAC’s negotiators are suggesting that the fact there is no expiry date on the convention makes it more of a code of conduct that the past time-bound versions. What was lost in a binding commitment is perhaps gained in improved parameters for what constitutes good food aid. This FAC will guide food aid into the future, making the definition of best practices particularly important. Moreover, the fact the convention does not oblige signatories to commit to a minimum food aid donation allows the possibility for recipient countries to become parties to the convention in the future. Food aid has a mixed, on the whole not very happy, reputation. It would be great to think the FAC can be a step on the way to its significant reform. I guess only time will tell.